In today's business world, reporting and analyses are used as tools to help companies build and sustain their lead over the competition. Sophisticated reporting and analytics scenarios are required by customers that want to be able to analyze their complete service processing lifecycle—and also individual processing phases within this lifecycle—from a performance perspective, and to define and determine corresponding key figures and key performance indicators (KPIs). Such reporting may allow companies to identify and address their weaknesses as well as to recognize their strengths and to leverage them accordingly.
Some computer systems are configured to evaluate KPIs or other performance measures relating to the efficiency of procedures carried out using the system. For example, in the processing of customer interactions, one KPI can be defined as the time it takes from when a customer makes a request until the request is met. The KPI then provides a measure of whether the customers are being serviced promptly or whether there are unacceptable delays.
An exemplary computer-based service processing lifecycle starts with the initial customer contact with the service organization, continues through a number of further processing phases such as the creation of a quotation, an order, an assignment, a confirmation and an invoice, and could end with the payment of the invoice by the customer. In this example, the process goes through a number of documents that are essential for its completion. Moreover, a subsequent document may depend on the completion of an earlier one. Bottlenecks may therefore occur during processing, for example because departments are understaffed, key individuals neglect to perform critical duties, or because of deficiencies in the administrative flow of information and documents.
There is a challenge in measuring the duration of processing phases not only within a single document but also over the whole business process, which could contain more than one document and may involve disparate components of a complex system. To require that such system components continuously report detailed information to pinpoint the occurrence of various events may first of all require them to be designed contemplating this procedure, or to be extensively modified, and second may affect the performance of the whole process.